Page 72 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Gustave Courbet: The Bathers 1853 + Julien Vallou de Villeneuve: Henriette Bonnion 1853
In 1853 Henriette Bonnion posed in Courbet’s studio for his painting The Bathers. In the same period, she also posed in the same studio for Julien Vallou de Villeneuve, the photographer friend of Courbet. Aaron Scharf: “...it is quite likely that Courbet knew and used his (Villeneuve’s) photographs in the 1850s..” The similarity between the poses and the photographs (in The Bathers - above - and in other Courbet paintings around this time (such as La femme au Perroquet, 1866, and the nude in L’Atelier 1855) suggest that Courbet - like others of his contemporaries (including Delacroix and Degas) - was using photographs as ‘reference’ - as a much cheaper alternative to paying artist models for sometimes long sittings. Scharf again: “In its rendering of pose and gesture photography offered the first comprehensive alternative to forms fixed by antique tradition.” The monochrome photographic image of naked women, shared the same aesthetic as photographs of classical statues, rendering unblemished purity of form, un-marred by the blotches and bruises of everyday life...
It was Aaron Scharf’s observation (Scharf: Art & Photography 1968) that photography of nude models provided a ‘comprehensive alternative’ to the canon of nude forms embodied in the classical tradition (ie surviving as sculpture, in statues, relief friezes, on ceramics, as plaster casts, etc). For countless art students and teachers, this antique canon was embodied in engravings, in plaster-casts and in carefully drawn copies of originals. This was how artists learned their business. Now suddenly there is a new, adaptable, and virtually instant alternative to the antique canon. Photography allowed artists to pose their own real-life models, in whatever stance they needed, and the black and white print itself would transmute the shivering mottled flesh of the model into an image akin to the monochrome alabaster reproductions of the classical. Later in the century entrepreneurial photographers like Louis Jean-Baptiste Igout, would make thousands of nude photographs, and package these as portfolios or catalogues for artists (from around 1870) - and of course bourgeois voyeurs - to use in their art or peruse for titillation or entertainment. Eadweard Muybridge was to produce the same kind of reference works, enhanced by his own serial-temporal sequential images, in the 1880s. By the 20th century, Emile Bayard published his extensive pictorial study ‘Le Nu Esthetique’ in 1903, and, bemused by the number ofnudes proliferating - in art and other media - the painter Walter Sickert would write his critical essay ‘The Naked and the Nude’ (1910)